PDFs on the free

Why pay buckets of money to Adobe for PDF creation when you can get the basics for free? For creating PDFs, I use PrimoPDF. It installs as a printer driver and allows you to “print” files to the PDF format. It’s not sophisticated and has way fewer features than the full blown Acrobat, but it works just fine for most of my purposes.

For reading PDFs, there is, of course, the free Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, it’s pretty bloated when all you want to do is simply view a PDF. For that, I use the Foxit Reader. It’s very lightweight and opens almost all the PDFs I’ve thrown at it (it has problems with some embedded forms, but that’s not the bulk of what I use it for). It’s also VERY fast.